On Monday, Wilbur Ross, the US commerce secretary, suggested any post-Brexit deal with Washington would hinge on the UK scrapping some EU rules that hinder imports of US chicken washed in chlorine or other products currently prohibited, such as hormone-treated beef.

Fox has previously been sympathetic to the change, though Michael Gove – secretary of state at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs – has repeatedly said Defra will not allow a weakening of UK food standards.

Speaking to business leaders in London at the CBI conference on Monday, Ross said changing the regulations would be a “critical component of any trade discussion” between the UK and the US.

“We have made very clear we are not going to see reductions in our standards as we move forward, partly because British consumers wouldn’t stand for it,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Tuesday.

‘We are entering an era where I think people will take a much bigger interest in trade agreements than they might have done in the past, on environmental standards, quality and safety, they will clearly have very strong views.”

Fox said the government would commit to a wider consultation process before signing new trade deals.

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“Consumers will want to be consulted – we don’t want to get into a situation where we’ve been with the TTIP agreement with the US and the EU where a huge amount of work is done only to find the public won’t accept it. We need to understand those parameters early on,” he said.

In his comments on Monday, Ross said it was important for the UK’s deal to leave the EU to take into account America’s “commercial interests”.

He said current EU regulations on food products, as well as automotive industry standards and chemical exports, were some of the “key impediments … Something we hope to be able to quickly fix between our two countries”.

Fox’s response to the US commerce secretary’s comments on Tuesday are markedly different to his previous approach to the issue, which led to a rift with cabinet colleagues.

In a separate committee however, Gove said the cabinet remained united in its opposition to the practice, but said that was on grounds of animal welfare, rather than because the chlorine wash was unsafe to eat.

The practice of washing chickens in the chlorine solution has been said to lead to an overall relaxing of hygiene standards for industrial meat production, therefore lowering welfare standards for the birds.